So Long, Elon
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On Friday afternoon, Elon Musk and President Trump did a little farewell Elon press conference in the Oval Office. Because I don't know, I've been watching these numbers a long time. I don't think I've ever seen the trade deficit cut in half in one month. I don't even really know how to describe this moment because it began with President Trump watching CNBC on a laptop. Not bad. Not bad. Come on, guys. Come on.

Anyway, the goodbye to the not-officially-head-of-doge, head-of-doge show was Trumpian and grandiose and riddled with inaccuracies about what the Doge cuts supposedly did. "Find it $8 million for making mice transgender. So they spent $8 million on making mice transgender." Yeah, no, those were studies on the health effects of hormones.

Elon gave an incredible service. Nobody liked him. And he had to go through the slings and the arrows, which is a shame because he's an incredible patriot. But I think it's fair to say that Elon's goodbye tour actually started a few weeks ago when he granted several interviews about SpaceX to mainstream news outlets.

I think, you know, it's really rare to see him do interviews at all. And I thought it was really interesting that he was starting to do interviews focused on his businesses again. Kate Conger is a New York Times tech reporter who covers Musk and X and co-wrote a book about his Twitter takeover.

the last couple of months. Anything he's said or done, it's been kind of all doge all the time. And then, yeah, then all of a sudden there's like this blitz of interviews that he comes out with and it's about SpaceX and Tesla and how he's back to businesses. And so I think, you know, it looks to me like a big effort on his part to kind of reframe the narrative and to pull himself out of the political spectrum and return to things where he has more traditional examples of success.

On the one hand, Elon was always going to officially leave the Trump administration. His status as a special government employee was only supposed to last 130 days. On the other, his companies are suffering, some Trump advisors don't like him, and he's become the face of several unpopular policies.

And I had at one point imagined a scenario where he just stayed involved and kept kind of supervising the Doge effort from afar, even though he was technically no longer an employee. But I think that that kind of started to shift for me in the last month or two. He went from posting...

Today on the show, Elon goes home. We think what he wrought, what he leaves behind and whether he'll be back.

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Let's go back a few months and scene set a bit. I mean, this was not too long ago. He was on stage at CPAC holding a chainsaw, giving this interview that some of your colleagues noted. You know, he was there to get things done and have a good time doing it, as he said. When would you say his good time ended or started to end?

I mean, I think that like the time between the election and inauguration were that was a really exciting period for him. And he was kind of getting introduced to Trump world, sitting down for a lot of conversations about what Doge was going to be and how it was going to look.

And then there's this sort of two-month period, February into early March, where that conquest was happening. And I think that was really exciting for him, too. He was moving into the Eisenhower building on the White House campus and getting to kind of wander in and out of the White House itself, meeting with the cabinet, and just kind of, I think, feeling the wave of his success there.

And then I would say probably, yeah, mid-March, early April, some of the things that he wanted to do were hitting roadblocks. The courts were blocking a lot of what Doge was doing. You know, he's running into issues with wanting to cut off funds that are congressionally appropriated, and he can't actually tell people to stop spending that money. And I think he started to, at that point, really understand the guardrails of the bureaucracy that he was dealing with.

and that he wouldn't be able to make some of the changes that he thought he could make. When I look at Doge's website and its own accounting of its work, you know, they say they've saved the government $175 billion. When you click through some of those individual contracts, though, some say this is a legal dispute, only about $71 billion is itemized, some things appear to be double-counted.

You have covered Elon for a long time, and I wonder what you make of this distance between this is what he says he's doing and this is what we can actually see. Yeah, so this is classic Elon to kind of throw out hyper-specific claims and then

sort of expect that by speaking it into reality, someone will come along and make it. So, um, you see it all the time with SpaceX. I mean, he's predicted so many times that we're going to be on Mars by X year. And many of those years have passed and we're not there. Um,

obviously. And, you know, we saw it a lot with the Twitter acquisition too, where he was telling investors, you know, by 2023, we're going to have this huge subscription business. And by 2025, we're going to be running a payments platform and earning revenue from all of those payments that users are going to be exchanging. So sort of these like very specific claims with specific timelines attached to them that have not come to fruition.

But the way that Elon works within his businesses is he makes these claims, he makes them publicly, and then he expects the people who work for him to deliver on his claims and to sort of hear what he's saying publicly and then race to make it so. And so I think that that's kind of what we're seeing with Doge and their so-called wall of receipts, that he's wanting to get to this number that he's benchmarked himself to.

you know, of $1 billion in savings or whatever. And everyone behind the scenes is scrambling to make the thing that he said true. At the same time, then there are also these real cuts where you look at federal workers who have been fired or furloughed, though a lot of that is in legal dispute. And then the massive cuts at USAID, which has led to reports of programs decimated, children dying. And so what I am trying to parse out is...

And maybe we can't know how much of this ends up being a permanent side effect of what Elon has done or an effect of what Elon has done and how much of this might at some point get undone. You know, I think that a lot of this may not be reversible. Um,

Obviously, it's hard to predict what might happen in the future. Clearly, the public health cuts, in many ways, the devastating effects of those are not reversible. Right. Yeah. And like what an incoming administration might do. I mean, you know, you're still talking about maybe years down the road where people have gone without these programs. But I mean, I think I...

see a lot of parallels between his takeover of Twitter and his takeover of the federal government. You know, and his outlook with Twitter was basically just we will cut until it breaks. And then when things are broken, we can add them back in. And that was sort of the approach with Doge of we're just going to cut everything. And, you know, if Social Security collapses or Medicaid collapses or some, you know, essential program collapses, then then we'll know we've gone too far and we can just plug it back in.

But I wouldn't say that X works as well today as it did when it was acquired. The site was just having outages in the last week or so. Grok, you know, the AI chatbot that's embedded in X was just kind of like spewing nonsense answers to unrelated questions. About white genocide. Continuing to bring up white genocide. So, you know, this isn't a site that I would say is functioning very well.

But it's sort of chugging along. And I think that that is in the near term the future that I see for Doge, that these cuts are going to be semi-permanent. Things may not work as well as they once did. And it will just continue to sputter along. There's this other thing which goes to

some of the people that Elon brought with him. Doge had been working on, seems to still be working on, some kind of central data repository, a data lake that blends together information from multiple federal agencies. What happens to that? Yeah, so this is another thing that I think could have a semi-permanent or permanent status. And I think...

That is work that is probably going to continue even after Elon leaves the government, that Doge is still going to be trying to assemble this data lake, as you said. And it's something that the government has avoided doing for a long time because of the privacy concerns that are involved in that. Because of just, I think, Americans' fears about what it means for the government to hold a centralized database of all of their information. People are resistant to that and they don't like it.

So, you know, I think there are concerns with how that data could be used, how it could be combined, whether or not it's being fed into AI to be assessed. There's a lot of concerns around the handling of that data. And I think that that issue is going to continue to play out. When we come back, what Elon got for his companies during his time in Washington. This episode is brought to you by Discover.

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You know, I want to talk about the personalities here because Elon, to be honest, lasted longer than I thought he would. There are a lot of big personalities involved here. What kind of relationship would you say he has...

with the White House and the Trump political apparatus now? So this is really interesting because I actually thought sort of the same thing. You know, Trump is a big personality. Elon is a big personality. It was easy to imagine the clash that could happen between them. And that hasn't really played out. Um,

You know, my colleagues who report on the White House have said that, you know, he and Trump are still pretty close. They seem to be getting along. You know, Elon is also working very closely with other people in Trump's orbit, like Katie Miller, Susan Miller's wife, who is now working with Elon and has been working with Doge over the last couple of months. So I think he is still very embedded in the MAGAverse. And

Maybe that will shift if he continues kind of airing out public grievances with things that the Trump administration is doing. But, you know, I think that the Republican Party needs him right now as a major donor. And so there is an incentive to keep that friendship and that relationship alive. There are also lots of caveats to the farewell tour. On Friday, President Trump said Elon wasn't really leaving, for whatever that's worth.

And Elon's really not leaving. He's going to be back and forth, I think. I have a feeling. It's his baby, and I think he's going to be doing a lot of things. But Elon's service to America... But even if Elon's future in Washington is a little unclear, some of his closest lieutenants are definitely leaving. What do you make of some of his people leaving as well? Steve Davis, Nicole Hollander. What does that tell you? What I wonder about that is how much...

Elon is going to continue to be able to receive about what Doge is doing. When he first said he was gonna step away, like I said earlier, I assume Steve would stay. I assume some of his other really close lieutenants would stay. If they pull back, Elon has a little bit less information about what's going on. And we've seen the inverse of this situation over the past couple of months with his businesses, where he's sort of disengaged from the businesses. He's not sure what's going on with them.

And there was a really wild scenario that played out at X and XAI this week with this, where Telegram, the messaging app, announced that it had a partnership with XAI and was going to integrate Grok into Telegram. Telegram announced it. Linda Iaccarino, X's CEO, was reposting it.

And then six or seven hours later, Elon logged on to X and said, hey, this deal isn't signed. And just completely undermined this entire thing and kind of threw his CEO under the bus. And so that's the kind of thing that I think could play out when Elon is less informed instead about what's happening in government and what's happening with Doge. You can see him become a critic.

and maybe say, oh, this cut is wrong or this should have been cut more. Because it's no longer his project and he doesn't have that kind of ownership and super tight surveillance over what is happening with it, he can become more of an external critic and say, oh, I wasn't involved in that. I didn't know what was going on with it and I disagree. And so...

I think it opens up an avenue for him to be more critical of what's happening in the government and to sort of myth make as well and say, well, I would have done it better if I could have stayed. But, you know, I was termed out of this position and they're kind of making a mess of my grand project without me. Well, there's also this thing where he obviously criticized the president's big, beautiful bill. But that seemed to bring with it like

frankly, degree of naivete about Washington. Like, Trump campaigned on this. This was not a secret. Help me understand that disconnect. Is Elon really surprised or is he just out there posting? I mean, I think that he had a lot of naivete about how the government works going into this. And I think it has been a learning experience for him as he's kind of run into these roadblocks for Doge.

And I think there's still a lot that he doesn't know, either because he didn't absorb it while he was there or someone told him this is the way it works and he just kind of breezed past it. It was like, that's the way it worked before and now I'm here and it's going to change. And so I think that may be a little bit of what's going on there, that he just kind of thought he would have more influence and thought, you know, he would be running a Silicon Valley style government. Well, there's also been, I think, some somewhat

fascinating leaking from the White House about him. And I can't tell how much of this is

palace intrigue. And I can't tell how much of this might be very convenient to be able to say if you are a GOP member of Congress. Oh, Elon did that. That wasn't us. Don't take your feelings out on us in the midterms, voters. Take them out on Elon Musk, who went back to his businesses. Yeah, no, I think that's true. And I think Elon even would agree with that. He has talked recently about how he felt like

Doge and Doge and himself were becoming scapegoats for anything people didn't like about what the government was doing. Um, even things that he said he was not responsible for. Um, so, so yeah. And I think it's, it's a, I think it's trickier for folks on the Republican side to navigate that because he's still a big donor. Um, and I think people want to appeal to him. They want his money. They certainly want his platform. You know, if he starts posting positively about a candidate, that's,

the best advertising in the world, probably. You can't buy that kind of political advertising. So yeah, I think there may be a tendency for some Republicans to throw him under the bus and say, hey, you know, that was Elon's fault and now he's gone and it's fine. But that's also really risky. You know, you don't want to end up in a flame war with the guy that has the most followers on the internet. Yeah.

Elon spent almost $380 million last year. And I want to talk a little bit about what his companies might get out of that. Many of his businesses depend on federal contracts in a big way. What does he get? SpaceX in particular, uh,

has a ton of federal contracts and is very dependent on the federal government. They were also kind of the strongest player in that space. So it's hard to say, okay,

Would SpaceX have won this contract anyway if Elon wasn't in government? Or is it because he's there that SpaceX is winning these contracts? I think where it becomes really clear to me is with Starlink. You know, Musk and his Doge folks embarked on this big project to install Starlink throughout the federal government and

you know, been hearing more and more about contracts that are being pushed to Starlink. So you really kind of see the conflict of interest and the influence that he has there. And, you know, I think with Tesla, it's hard, it's, you know, Trump had this whole event on the White House lawn promoting Tesla, right? And that didn't seem to move the needle much for Tesla, actually. You know, they came out with their earnings report

a month or two ago. And, you know, they are getting really hammered by the reputational damage that Elon is experiencing. It turns out, you know, electric vehicle consumers aren't big fans of the Trump administration. And so, you know, it hasn't been as beneficial to Tesla, perhaps, as it has been for SpaceX and Starlink. You know, one of the reasons I wanted to talk to you is because you have followed his behavior so closely over the past few years. And

Often he exists in a world of his own making. There are these instances where he has confronted negative public opinion. I think of this moment when he was like on stage at a Dave Chappelle show in 2022 during the Twitter takeover and he gets booed. And there's like an analog sort of to looking at public opinion shift on Tesla and Doge and

what does he do when people don't like him or speak negatively about him in public? There's a couple of things. Like you said, he really doesn't like this. And with the Chappelle incident, it's so funny. So this is what the first thing he tried to do was sort of spin it and say, oh, it was 90% cheers and 10% boos, you know? And then he got made fun of for saying that and deleted the tweet where he said it. And...

What I'm seeing him do more now with the negative sentiment that he's encountering is to kind of weave it into this really like grand plot against him.

You know, with protests and stuff against Tesla specifically, his commentary has really revolved around who's funding this, who's behind it, who are the secret donors that are paying people to go out and to protest at Tesla dealerships.

And sort of suggesting that there's like this dark money operation that is incentivizing people to protest against him and that it sort of undermines the idea that people would protest him. It's like these people actually like him. They actually care about him.

If not for the fact that someone was writing them a check, they wouldn't be out there picketing in front of one of his dealerships, you know? And so, again, you kind of see that, like, massaging of the truth to be like, well, it was 90% cheers. Even the protesters, they don't hate me. It's just someone's paying them to protest.

Elon promised to donate $100 million to the president's political operation, which my understanding from your from you and your colleagues reporting is that that has not happened yet. Will he continue to be this GOP super donor? Do we have any idea?

So that's tricky. You know, he has said himself in the past couple of weeks that he wants to spend less on politics. And like you said, some of my colleagues have reported that there are people still waiting on checks from him, money he has promised and has not delivered. So I think that that is potentially really scary for the GOP fundraising apparatus. I think that...

There may be enough evidence for Elon that his money was successful that he would continue to donate. But the one sort of...

counterbalance to that, right, is this race in Wisconsin that just happened where he spent a bunch of money. The candidate that he was campaigning for did not get elected. It was not even particularly close. And so I think that that could curtail his spending a little bit. If he doesn't feel like his money is being effective and getting him what he wants, maybe he spends less.

Again and again since last fall when your book Character Limit came out, I have been like, oh, this was a blueprint for how Elon Musk has handled himself in Washington. And I don't know, were people just like not paying attention or did they think he would get to D.C. and be different? Because it very much does seem to be very similar to what happened at Twitter. And I wonder...

if there is anything that has surprised you about his arc in the last six months. Yeah, I think the Twitter takeover was absolutely the blueprint for Doge. And Musk has said that himself. My co-author Ryan and I had made a video kind of

like, positing that thesis a while ago, and he reposted it and was like, yeah, it is the playbook. So, you know, I think he agrees with that thesis. I think...

There was a lot there. I saw a lot of sentiment between the election and the inauguration that was sort of similar to sentiment around Trump's first term where people were thinking, you know, Elon is going to be constrained by the bureaucracy or, you know, this Doge thing is a vanity project and he's not actually going to have any influence and control. And I felt very strongly that that was not the case and that, you know, he would want to

really get his fingers into the guts of the federal government. And people have lost their jobs and lost their lives. Yeah, yeah. And so that period...

Before the inauguration, I really felt like the alarm bells were going off for me. And a lot of the conversation I was seeing didn't match that where people like, oh, it's not going to be that serious, whatever, whatever. And I was like, no, I think it's going to actually be really serious. I think he means what he says. He wants to get in there and like tear the government apart.

What is surprising to me in the last six months is that he has kind of lost stamina for it. That is surprising to me. I felt like he was really going to stick with this. And even after his special government employee status expired, that he was going to find ways to stay involved. And the fact that he is right now talking about stepping away, going back to his businesses, retreating from politics, that part of it is surprising to me.

Kate Conger, thank you so much for coming on and for talking with me. Thank you so much for having me. Kate Conger covers technology for The New York Times and is the co-author of the book Character Limit, How Elon Musk Destroyed Twitter.

And that is it for our show today. What Next TBD is produced by Evan Campbell, Patrick Fort, and Shana Roth. Our show is edited by Rob Gunther. TBD is part of the larger What Next family. And if you like what you heard today, the number one way to support our independent journalism is to join Slate Plus. You get all your Slate podcasts, including this one, ad-free. Just head on over to slate.com slash whatnextplus to sign up.

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